I opened mine at 6:17 on a Monday morning and discovered that six hundred strangers believed I was dying of leukemia.

Chapter 2

By Wednesday, I had gone from “the brave cancer girl” to “the girl who faked cancer.”

Coach asked me to sit out two games until things settled down. Tessa stopped sitting beside me on the bus. A sophomore tossed a pack of gum onto my library table and said, “For your chemo,” while his friends laughed.

I wanted to disappear.

Then a boy named Abel Chen sat across from me.

We shared computer science and had spoken maybe six times.

He opened his laptop.

“The hospital picture didn’t come directly from a camera.”

I stared at him.

“What?”

“The fundraiser picture. I downloaded it.”

He enlarged the image and started explaining compression patterns and file dimensions. Most of it went over my head.

“What’s your point?”

“It was probably saved from a shared photo album.”

I stopped breathing.

Dad had uploaded hospital pictures to our family album so Grandma June wouldn’t panic.

Abel clicked another tab.

“And the medical letter is fake.”

“How do you know?”

“Wrong hospital logo. St. Anne’s changed theirs two years ago.”

That was the first good thing anyone had told me all week.

The family album had only five users that I knew about.

Dad.

Me.

Rory.

Grandma June.

And Dad’s girlfriend, Denise.

Denise had lived with us for eight months. She worked at a dental office, cooked good lasagna, and never entered my room without knocking.

She was also the only person on the list who wasn’t family.

That night, I watched her through dinner.

She barely ate. She kept checking her phone.

Later, I remembered something else.

Three weeks earlier, Denise had come home with a new silver SUV.

At three in the morning, I heard her downstairs whispering on the phone.

“I can’t keep doing this.”

Pause.

“He can’t find out.”

Pause.

“I’ll figure out the money.”

Then she started crying.

I wrote every word down.

Saturday night, the fundraiser announced that I’d been moved to intensive care.

Please pray harder than you’ve ever prayed. The next 48 hours are critical.

In twenty minutes, donations jumped another three thousand dollars.

Then someone organized a candlelight vigil.

At our house.

By nine-thirty, more than a hundred people stood on our lawn holding candles.

Some were crying.

Some sang hymns.

Others held signs with my name.

I watched from behind the curtains wearing sweatpants, holding a bowl of cereal.

It felt like watching my own funeral while still alive.

Dad went onto the porch.

“She’s fine!” he shouted. “She’s inside!”

A woman yelled back, “Then why isn’t she at the hospital?”

Someone else shouted, “Let us see her!”

I don’t know why I opened the door.

Maybe I was tired of hiding.

I stepped onto the porch.

The crowd went silent.

Hundreds of candles flickered.

Then someone laughed.

“Oh my God. She’s not even sick.”

A man shouted that he wanted his money back.

Phones rose everywhere.

A girl from school called me disgusting.

Dad pulled me inside and locked the door.

By midnight, the video had eighty thousand views.

A local reporter, Neil Boyd, posted it with the caption: Teen appears healthy at vigil held in her honor.

The fundraiser immediately responded.

What you saw tonight was a very sick girl trying to protect her family while heavily medicated.

People believed that too.

The next morning, Rory was uninvited from a birthday party.

Dad’s boss told him to take a few days off.

Grandma June stopped attending her church coffee group because people kept asking whether I was a criminal.

Then Rory came home with a scrape on his elbow.

He wouldn’t explain it until I sat on his bedroom floor building Legos with him.

Finally, he whispered, “A fifth grader pushed me.”

“Why?”

“He called me the scam girl’s brother.”

I went into the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and cried.

After that, I stopped wishing the problem would disappear.

I wanted whoever did it found.

I created a folder on my laptop called PROOF.

I saved every fundraiser update, every screenshot, my hospital discharge papers, Abel’s research, the fake doctor’s letter, the vigil video, the graffiti, everything.

Then I noticed something.

The true details on the fundraiser page were old.

Pickle.

My broken wrist.

My dislike of hospitals.

Being born during a snowstorm.

Everything about my current life was wrong.

Whoever was writing the page knew me extremely well as a child.

But hardly knew me now.

I underlined that twice.

The following Monday, Kenzie cornered me in the girls’ bathroom.

She locked the door.

“I need to show you something.”

She pulled up messages from three months earlier.

The sender was Aunt B.

The sunflower profile.

Hi, sweetie. I’m putting together a surprise scrapbook for my niece’s senior year. You two used to be so close. Do you have old pictures? Anything she still loves from when she was little?

Kenzie had sent photographs from middle-school sleepovers.

She had also told Aunt B about Pickle.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

Kenzie started crying.

“I got scared. When I saw those pictures on the fundraiser, I knew I’d helped. I thought everybody would blame me.”

“So you blamed me first.”

She nodded.

It was ugly.

At least it was honest.

I forwarded everything to Detective Voss.

That night, Denise came into my room.

“I know you think it’s me.”

My whole body went cold.

She sat down.

Then she told me she’d been fired from the dental office two months earlier.

Every morning she’d been leaving in scrubs and spending the day at the library applying for jobs because she was ashamed to tell Dad.

The SUV was an irresponsible lease she was already behind on.

The phone call I’d overheard was with her sister.

She showed me her bank account.

Two hundred fourteen dollars.

Then she handed her phone to Dad and called Detective Voss herself.

I felt awful.

“I didn’t know who to trust,” I told Dad afterward.

He looked exhausted.

“I know.”

That was all he said.

Two days later, Abel had an idea.

“If they’re taking pictures from the family album, give them a picture they can’t get anywhere else.”

So we created one.

I sat on the bathroom counter wearing Dad’s old gray knit cap pulled low over my forehead.

Behind me, on the mirror, Abel had told me to place something tiny and identifiable. I stuck a yellow note in the corner with A7 written on it.

Dad took the picture.

At 7:02 p.m., he uploaded it only to the family album.

Then we waited.

Rory’s tablet stayed on the kitchen counter.

Denise’s phone was with Detective Voss.

Grandma June was at bingo, and according to her neighbor, her iPad was sitting on her desk at home.

Dad and I sat beside each other.

At 8:49, my phone buzzed.

The fundraiser had posted.

She finally let us take a picture today. She hates the beanie, but she’s still our fighter.

Below the words was our photograph.

Dad stared at it.

The yellow note was partly cropped.

But A7 was still visible.

“It worked,” I whispered.

Then the relief disappeared.

Because nobody with access to the album could have posted it.

Dad opened the album settings.

He scrolled through the members.

Dad.

Lily.

Rory.

Grandma June.

Denise.

Then one more name appeared at the bottom.

Dad stopped moving.

I read it twice.

Lorraine Parker.

My mother.